


Stop Crying Your Heart Out

by bluepeony



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-17 08:38:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17557016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluepeony/pseuds/bluepeony
Summary: School has finished, summer is rushing by, and all Sirius wants to do is keep up.





	1. Saturday Night

**Author's Note:**

> A small project to keep me sane while I navigate the current stresses of life. I can't say how quickly I'll be able to post new chapters, but if people enjoy this then I will endeavour to keep it updated as regularly as possible.
> 
> refs to drink, drugs & sex throughout.

Sometimes Sirius gets himself into these situations, and the unfortunate reality is that he only has himself to blame.

It’s half past midnight and he’s sitting on the edge of someone else’s bathtub, eyes flitting back and forth between the ostentatious marble backsplash above the sink, and Robbie Luckinbill’s gay crisis. Sirius rocks back slightly, stretching his legs out. Knocks the toes of his pointed boots together. Clicks his tongue. Sighs, a bit louder than he means to.

“Robbie, are you okay? I might just… look, I’m gonna go, alright? It’s best if I go.”

“What? Why?”

“Because if you actually faint from hyperventilating I really don’t want to get blamed.”

“I’m not hyperventilating,” Robbie snaps, flushing red. He’s crouched on the lid of the toilet by the window, trying to aim the smoke from his cigarette outside. They’re in Caradoc Dearborn’s house. Last Sirius saw Caradoc was filling his mum’s Alessi decanter with vodka and jelly cubes, sticking a lighter underneath and trying to make it boil. He really probably doesn’t care if someone’s stealing a smoke in his upstairs loo.

But Robbie Luckinbill doesn’t smoke. It’s like he’s trying to inhale the whole stick at once, and it’s so obvious he’s only doing it because he thinks he _ought_ to that Sirius feels a bit sorry for him. They’d toppled into the bath only minutes before in a frenzy, kissing clumsily, scattering the Dearborns’ lavish grooming products and a family of plastic ducks. Now Sirius is glancing surreptitiously at his watch, wondering how far it is to walk home from here. He spent his taxi money on a bottle of Sailor Jerry. It disappeared not long after he arrived, meaning he never even got to taste the fruits of his own imprudence.

“Sorry,” says Robbie. “I think you’re really fit, I just –” A loud bang at the door interrupts. “Shit!” His hand almost seems to spasm as he casts the cigarette out of the window like a twelve year old caught by his mum. “What do we do?”

“Do?” Sirius glances at the door. “It’s not the police, Robbie.”

“I mean we can’t walk out together, can we? Look, I’ll go first – and you – you get behind the shower curtain.”

“I am not hiding behind the shower curtain,” Sirius mutters, but Robbie isn’t listening. The intruder bangs on the door again.

“Say we were doing drugs!” Robbie hisses.

Sirius glares at him. “This was _your_ idea. Have you forgotten that?”

The person bangs at the door again. “Hurry up! Here, I hope someone isn’t having _sex_ in there?” This is followed by a loud, almost psychotic guffaw only a private school sixth former could hack up.

Robbie pales to the shade of off-milk. Sirius strides to the door and pulls it open. There stands a very large, square boy he vaguely recognises as one of the brick-head rugby players from St Teresa’s.

“What were you _doing_ in there?” he asks, wobbling slightly as he stands in the doorway.

“Coke,” says Sirius, and turns back to Robbie. “Okay?”

**

It’s a warm, muggy night. Sirius walks home. It takes half an hour or so, but only because he meanders. In fact, he stops at one of the off licences still open and buys a Snickers bar. He didn’t bother having dinner, in the (yes, he knows, _ill-advised_ ) hopes of getting drunk quicker, but he’s just spent three pointless hours at Caradoc’s house only to leave very sober and very hungry.

Sober, hungry, and a bit sad. Not sad because Robbie cornered him on the landing and feverishly suggested they trade blowies in the bathroom, then chickened out last minute, but because the thought of being found out was clearly so mortifying he’d rather have had people think the two of them were chopping up coke with Caradoc’s mum’s metal nail files.

Sirius understands being scared. He was scared the first time he had sex two months ago, crammed into the back of a Kia Picanto with Luis St James at Thorpe Park. He cried a little afterwards. Not because it was bad (although it was a bit bad). Just because he didn’t know what to do with himself when he got home, and he floated about the house aimlessly and felt weird about the whole thing because Luis St James was the boy who used to eat craft paper in Year 8.

It didn’t really matter, though. Frankly, Sirius was just glad to get the whole virginity issue sorted and out of the way. Still… he can’t help thinking, when he’s feeling particularly sentimental, that it might one day be nice to shag someone who doesn’t want him to hide behind a shower curtain.

“Sirius? Why are you home so early?” asks Alphard, when Sirius arrives home and wanders into the living room.

“Why are you up so late?” he counters. He shrugs off his jacket and flops on to the couch beside his uncle, watching as he takes off his reading glasses and puts down his book. _A Room in Chelsea Square_. Alphard’s favourite genre: high camp.

“I’m tea partying. Couldn’t nod off, could I, next door’s bloody cat wouldn’t cease its incessant yowling.”

Sirius knows, and is fairly certain his uncle knows, that next door don’t have a cat, but for some peculiar reason there has always been an unspoken agreement between them that when Alphard is in too much pain with his arthritis to sleep, he’ll blame it on next door’s melancholy cat. They even have a name for it: Grizabella.

“Can I get you anything?” Sirius asks.

“I’m fine. I’ve raided the cabinets for any leftover antibiotics so I’m feeling rather fantastic.”

He’s joking. Possibly.

Alphard pops a marker in his book and closes it properly, pushing it and his teacup to the other side of the coffee table so he can put his slippered feet up. “Did you have a good night? Aren’t you staying at James’? Isn’t James staying here?”

Uncle Alphard, who has been encouraging Sirius to try to get into all manner of cokey clubs since he was sixteen, considers one in the morning to be the time a good party _starts_. He _loves_ the fact that Sirius gets invited to places. When he’s feeling a bit brighter, he likes to sit up late with him and have Sirius relay all the goriest details; who snogged who and who got into a fist fight and who tripped over where and broke which bone trying to down what bottle. His very favourite story is the one Sirius tells about Frank Longbottom pissing in a spider plant at James’ sixteenth birthday, panicking, and promptly chucking it out the window on to Alice Fortescue’s head.

“James said I was the biggest let down since Al Capone’s vaults and refused to come back with me.”

Alphard laughs. He always seems to think Sirius makes James’ insults up. Sometimes he does, just because he gets a kick out of his uncle’s funny wheezy chuckle. “James said I’m basically just a low rent Emo Phillips today,” is all he’ll have to say to make Alphard double over.

“Tell me everything then,” his uncle says, but through a tired sigh, so that Sirius knows he’s already starting to nod off again. By the time Sirius has finished his brief, gentle ramble, relayed between frequent yawns, Alphard is asleep; snoring and slumped. Sirius carefully stands and covers him with the heavy throw they keep over the back of the sofa specifically for these moments, then clears away his uncle’s empty cup and favourite marbled tea-for-one pot into the kitchen, humming Grizabella the Glamour Cat under his breath.

**

He lives with his uncle in a green part of Guildford. The house is too big for just the two of them, but Alphard has lived here since the 1960s, and for the most part it shows. Not in a bad way. At least, Sirius doesn’t think so. He loves the green gloss tiles in the enormous kitchen, and the vast upstairs landing with its deep blue carpet and campy yellow love seat on leather wheels. Even the avocado suite in the master bathroom somehow manages to look welcoming. Years after everyone else ripped theirs out and crammed in white enamel, trying to forget green bathtubs ever happened, Alphard was having a large bronze waterfall tap affixed to his, clearly dissatisfied that the tub wasn’t standing out quite _enough_.

It’s just Sirius’ bedroom which reflects the current year. Even then it’s only because two rainy winters ago a bad leak in the ceiling meant they had to say goodbye to the coral superfresco and have the room re-plastered. Sirius chose dark, dark blue for the walls and hung a huge constellations tapestry from Urban Outfitters above the white fireplace. He loved it, until Dorcas Meadowes stuck her nose in once (back when Alphard’s house was the chosen hub for exam “revision”) and tried to make him feel bad. “Urban Outfitters hate the gays,” she’d snarled (those were her actual words to him; ‘the gays’) “ _and_ they promote detox tea. _Animals_.”

So now every time Sirius looks at it he has to be reminded that he’s a fat-shaming homophobe. But it glows in the dark, and he can see himself on it, to the right of his uncle and just to the bottom left of his dad, so he hasn’t the heart to take it down.

He’s tried to be quite _minimalist_ with the rest of his room, hoping it might enlighten him somehow. He read about minimalism and enlightenment in one of his mother’s coffee table books when she was going through a spate of Buddhism. The art of letting go had been quite appealing to Sirius. In his room he has a white wardrobe and a big bed and bare floorboards. On the night stand is a huge salt lamp his dad bought him in Saudi Arabia. That’s about it.

Sirius hasn’t felt very enlightened yet, and he still craves things. Mostly he just finds it a slog to go downstairs to the back living room any time he wants to play FIFA, because his mum's book said don't put a telly in your bedroom.

Still, it’s better than his room at his parents’ house, which in fact isn’t his room anymore and has, as of April just gone, been turned into a yoga and pole dance studio. Who this is intended for, Sirius isn’t sure. People in his family generally prefer to starve themselves rather than exercise. Nevertheless, it was there last time he went round, stripper pole slap bang in all its glory right down the centre of where his bed used to be. It’s like a great big middle finger, telling him his mother has finally given up on trying to get him to move back home.

When Sirius goes into his room that night after tucking his uncle up on the sofa, he taps on the salt lamp and collapses on to his bed. He lies in silence for a few moments because it’s so warm and so still, making him tired. The windows have been thrown wide all day to let the air in, but it just seems to have made the room muggier. He’s on the brink of sleep when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He struggles to pull it out of his tight jeans.

It’s Robbie.

_Do u want to come round??_

Sirius stares at the message, rubbing at his eye with his palm, vision blurry from almost nodding off.

Does he want to go round? For what?

Well, it’s obvious for what.

Part of him thinks: _Fuck **off** , mate._

The other part – a larger part – thinks _yes, I do – I do want to come round. You pop the cork, Robert, I’ll bring the Durex._

He won’t. There’ll be no cork popping. He’s tired. He’s walked all the way back home and Robbie lives – where is it? Burpham? Somewhere like that – somewhere too far, anyway.

He chucks his phone to the other side of the bed without even replying. It’s frustrating. Sex never seems to come along when Sirius _wants_ it to; only ever in hindsight. It seems to always ends up scampering up to him when it’s too late, panting and red-faced, tapping him meekly on the shoulder, asking _Do u want to come round??_ Always when Sirius is too tired, or too anxious, or too proud to go through with it.

Yes, sex is becoming a problem. Craved, elusive, and still (though Sirius would never admit it to anybody, not even James) rather mystifying despite the Kia Picanto episode.  He knows this isn’t very Buddhist of him, but he wishes he could just _do_ it, like his friends can do it, swiftly and carelessly. They have it easy; they get down to earth girls at hot, thumpy parties. What does Sirius get? Robbie Luckinbill from Year 10 Biology, hyperventilating on top of a toilet.

 


	2. Scooters

It’s Sunday the next day, so there’s nothing open and nothing to do. Sirius’ mother calls out of the blue and asks him to come round for lunch, then calls back an hour later to apologise that she’s double booked and has to cancel.

“You can still come round, sweetie. You can come and sit in the orangery.”

“What’s an orangery?”

“It’s a sort of glass house with plants and things.”

“Do you mean the greenhouse?”

“No, sweetie, we’ve had it turned into an orangery.”

“So has it got orange trees in it, then?”

“No, don’t be silly, of course not.”

He passes on the invitation. His parents’ house is bad enough when it’s got people in it, let alone when it’s empty without even a bedroom to retreat to, what with his room now having been turned into a double-page spread for ELLE Decoration.

He stays home most of the day and gets on Alphard’s nerves trying to help around the house, then grabs his jacket and heads out around seven to meet up with James and the others at Scooters.

It’s another warm evening so they’re sitting outside on the grassy bit by the canal with the picnic tables. Scooters is an old pub in Guildford, but its only real patrons are local sixth formers and students from the university. It’s a bit scruffy, even with its claim to a drop of the Surrey waterside, but Sirius and his friends have been hanging around here since they were about fifteen. They used to loiter about after last call in the hopes that Steve the barman would slip them a few Smirnoff Ices past their sell-by date.

They’re here all the time now that they can drink legally; since exams finished two weeks ago, it feels like they’ve taken up semi-permanent residency.

“Boys,” Sirius greets them, as Frank and Fabian automatically scoot to either side of their bench to make space for him in the middle. Gideon and James sit opposite. Sirius’ usual has already been ordered and placed in front of him; Corona and lime, and two packets of salt and vinegar crisps.

“Hey, pal,” says James. He jerks a thumb in Gideon’s direction. “Can you tell this fucking idiot that the moon exists?”

“Listen, you fucking idiot,” says Sirius, sitting down. “The moon has to exist. It’s where the Clangers live.”

“The Clangers lived on a planet _like_ the moon, they didn’t live on _the_ moon,” Frank says unhelpfully.

“I didn’t say the moon doesn’t exist,” Gideon argues. “I said I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be fake. To be some vast and complex projection, orchestrated by NASA and the –”

“He thinks the moon is a hologram,” James declares; as a soon-to-be Physics undergraduate, he’s clearly stung. “He thinks the moon, earth’s only friend, is being beamed into space by Elon Musk.”

It’s apparent the discussion has been going on for some time since before Sirius arrived. James is in full space geek mode, like he always is when he comes back from Manchester. He gets all riled up from daydreaming over what he considers the very real possibility of Professor Brian Cox one day becoming his teacher when he goes to university there in September. Gideon only makes him worse with the crackpot conspiracy theories; he once tried to convince them, with alarming sincerity, that New Zealand wasn’t real.

Gideon is away with the fairies half the time. His twin brother, Fabian, isn’t far behind. James, on the other hand, is the only person Sirius has ever known who could be both a professional footballer and an astrophysicist.

“NASA astronauts brought back nearly _900 pounds_ of moon rock,” he’s saying now, impassioned. James is weirdly obsessed with moon rock. He keeps saying he hopes there’s samples at university. What he wants to do with them, Sirius isn’t sure. He once joked that James should crush it up and snort it – snort the _moon_ – and James had looked at him like he’d just suggested going to Washington D.C. to set NASA on fire.

Sirius doesn’t know what he wants to do after the summer. Right now he’s only thinking as far ahead as finishing his Corona, and getting another. He picks the lime out of the top of the bottle and squeezes it into the glass, making the lager fizz.

“Anyone fancy going out later?” he says, taking a swig, hoping to divert the conversation away from lunar material.

“Out out?” says Fabian. “Town out?”

“Skint,” Frank says glumly.

Sirius is about to offer him cash, but stops himself because he knows it bugs Frank when he does that. Alphard always gives Sirius money to go out. Too much really. He knows he’ll end up sneaking most of it back into his uncle’s wallet when he gets home.

“I’m up for town,” says James.

“Or ours?” Gideon suggests. “Empty house?”

Sirius doesn’t care which they do. He just wants to have a better night than last night. He does like going to the twins’ house, though. It’s got a big wood fired hot tub in the garden, and a summer house with an air hockey table their dad rescued from an old arcade clearance. The five of them spent most of last summer in the Jacuzzi, at first concerned as to the level of assumed homoeroticism. Then Lily from school expressed her admiration at how mature and Grecian they all were, and suddenly James decided getting into a hot tub in his undies with the lads was the most happening thing ever.

Lily. Speak of the devil. Sirius spots her copious amounts of red hair over by the back door of Scooters before he notices anything else.

“Lily’s here,” he says, at which point James, who has since started talking about space again, shuts up. He’s fine with Lily thinking he enjoys bathing with his best mates, but for Lily to find out that he’s turned on by selenography would apparently be a step too far.

Lily and her gaggle rock up at the table besides theirs. Frank’s sort-of girlfriend Alice squeezes on to the end of their bench, almost knocking Sirius and Fabian off.

“Can we sit, do you mind?” she says, already sitting, and clearly not very fussed as to whether or not anyone is minding.

“There’s space here, Lily,” says James, pointing to the distinct lack of space beside him.

Lily and James have been seeing each other on and off since Year 11. Things were almost cemented after a brief tussle in a tent during a class trip to Colomendy in Lower Sixth, but then Lily started seeing a guy in the year above at St Teresa’s, and James was gutted. Then the guy went off to university, and now James and Lily are sort of on again, except in this instance ‘on’ means flirting aggressively with each other whenever they happen to meet up, then parting ways at the end of the night because they’re both too proud to suggest actually sleeping together.

It’s not like virginity’s the issue. James sorted that out in Year 11 with Becca Ireland at Sirius’ sixteenth birthday party (it had actually happened in Sirius’ bedroom, and he’d felt aggrieved about it for weeks). And if rumours are to believed (which of course, they always are) Lily also managed to shed the burden of celibacy with her broad shouldered but, Sirius had assured James at the time, intensely _spotty_ St Teresa’s boyfriend.

“I don’t want to get attached,” was James’ response when questioned by his friends as to the meaning behind his and Lily’s strange courting game. “I mean, I don’t want _her_ to get attached,” he’d quickly added. “I’m moving in September. She’d be heartbroken, let’s face it.”

Sirius still isn’t convinced. He’s pretty sure this is all some sick game straight people play just because they can. They’ll let it build and build and build until the tension becomes unbearable, and then they’ll end up shagging at some party on results day. He can see it now; the dumb, sheepish look James will have on his face afterwards, the way his friends will jeer and demand details. When Sirius finally elected to tell James about the Thorpe Park fiasco, James had gone a weird shade of white and started gabbling about why Alton Towers was better. Somehow Sirius imagines when James and Lily finally make it, they won’t get quite the same reaction.

Lily doesn’t take James’ invitation. She sits on the grass instead, her legs tucked beneath her, pointedly facing away from James because, Sirius knows, this is how it works between them. She’s got long, skinny, freckly legs, and she always wears these really short, floaty swing dresses. She seems to have perfected the art of sitting cross-legged in them without showing her underwear.

She looks up at Sirius, who’s closest to where she’s sitting, and smiles brightly. Sirius has always liked Lily. She’s funny and unaffected, with a big, happy mouth and a bit of an ugly laugh. He’s never been as sure about her friends; Dorcas Meadows, who’s rude, and Alice, who’s a bit wet. She knocks around with a few from St Teresa’s too: intrepid Marlene, awkward Edgar, fit Remus.

Ah yes, he’s here. Fit Remus.

Sirius has always fancied Remus a _little_ bit. Ever since Year 10 Sports Day, shared each year by both their schools at Tunlam Park, when Sirius had first discovered him basking on the baked grass like some lithe creature out of _Brideshead Revisited_ , carelessly ignoring the tannoy call requesting he make his way to the long jump.

The little bit of fancying has jerked into a higher gear this summer. Sirius is used to seeing all the St Teresa’s lot in their dreary black and red uniform; even the sixth form pseudo office-wear wasn’t much cheerier. Now school has finished, he keeps catching Remus at the pub or the park or in town in his own clothes, slim jeans and stripy t-shirts and marl jumpers with sleeves that fall way past the wrists. It’s the usual indie boy fodder, but Sirius would be lying if he said his type wasn’t boys who look like they could be in The 1975. Part of the reason he agreed to give Robbie a blowjob was because he’d been wearing a skinny blazer and Chelsea boots.

Remus looks nigh-on perfect in his denim jacket and yellow t-shirt, limbs all long and sharp. Sirius tries to smile at him, but Remus is standing with Edgar, focusing on lighting a roll-up, and doesn’t notice.

Sirius doesn’t really know anything about him, but there’s two things he likes about Remus:

  * He’s fit
  * He seems like the kind of person who smokes because he wants to, and not because it makes him look like someone from The 1975.



What Sirius doesn’t like is how the power balance seems to shift when Remus is around – no, when _any_ pretty Matty Healy lookalike is around. When it’s just Sirius and his friends, he never has to worry that what he’s saying won’t be well-received, or funny, or clever. Throw a hot boy into the mix and he turns into Beaker from the Muppets.

Thankfully, Remus and the others slope off pretty quickly, finding their own table over by the waterside. Lily sticks around, gradually moving from the grass, to a seat next to Gideon, to (inevitably) a seat beside James. He shares his crisps with her; at one point their hands touch when reaching for the packet, and they both jump, as if it wasn’t planned. It’s pretty dreadful to watch.

Lily’s telling them about how she couldn’t make Caradoc’s party yesterday; she was looking round the university in Exeter. She wants to study Anthropology, with a specialism in linguistics. James does what all arsehole boys do, and says, “What could you do with a degree in _that_?” Lily doesn’t share his crisps after that. She nabs a couple from Sirius’ packet instead.

“It was all a bit la-de-da though,” she continues, not gracing James’ stupid question with an answer. “A bit, what’s the phrase, erm… jolly hockey sticks, shall we say. Don’t know that it's my kind of place. The city is _gorgeous_ , though.”

Lily got provisional offers to all her university choices. So did James. Gideon got accepted to Aberystwyth, which was the only one he really wanted. Fabian got an offer from York, but it’s dependent on his getting three A’s. Frank’s going to an aviation academy to become a pilot.

Sirius applied to the first three universities whose syllabuses he picked out randomly in the Careers Library. They got three free applications and his teachers said he had to use them. It was all pointless anyway; he’s going to take a gap year.

Maybe two.

“Have you decided where you’re going on your gap year yet, Sirius?” asks Lily, as if reading his mind.

That’s another nice thing about Lily. Even if she doesn’t see someone very often, she remembers everything they tell her. Sirius must have mentioned the gap year thing to her at least four months ago at the twins’ February half term house party, and both of them were drunk, and she still remembers.

“I don’t think I’m going to go anywhere, I’m just… going to look for a job, I think.”

“A job?” says Frank. He likely doesn’t mean for it to come out as rudely as it does. Frank doesn’t mean he thinks Sirius isn’t _capable_ of working. Well, Sirius hopes he doesn’t think that.

What he’s really asking is, why would Sirius bother getting a job when his family keep him so well?

“What else would I do, doss around the house all day? Tend to the garden??”

“Don’t you want to travel a bit?” says Lily.

Sirius shrugs, uselessly. He hates that question. If he says yes, he just sounds like another typical navel-gazing gap-yah wanker. If he says no, he just sounds spoilt and uninspired; over it all. Maybe part of him does want to jet off to find himself in Indonesia, forgive his flaws in Tibet, visit family in Italy, sleep with pretty boys in Paris.

Another part of him - a louder part - thinks… _effort_.

When he was younger, he used to think he’d conquer some city, like his parents. He pictured himself in London doing… well, he wasn’t quite sure what; the daydream changed every time. Sometimes he’d be clacking away on a duck egg blue typewriter in a rented bedsit, chain-smoking. Other times he’d be striding the hallways of glass and steel high-risers in a Savile Row suit. Occasionally he saw himself sipping strawberry daiquiris in a black and gold nightclub in Mayfair – on the house, of course, because he was the owner. In these particular scenarios, he always seemed to be wearing some ostentatious floral tuxedo.

Just as soon as the fantasies begin, the likely reality elbows its way in: an image of himself, conquered, sloping shame-faced back to Surrey, clutching his backpack and the grubby Dolce and Gabbana blazer.

It’s just not worth the bother.

“Right, let’s get a shimmy on. Who wants another?” he asks, reverting to his earlier resolution to only think as far ahead as his next drink. He must change the subject. He must not be asked to account for his lack of ambition.

The others nod, they want to carry on, thank God. He leaves Lily and James bickering over pointless crap, the twins trading vape cartridges. Frank’s already disappeared with Alice. Everyone always seems to have _someone_. Without even trying.

Sirius weaves through the students scattered about the grass outside Scooters, all of them in couples, all intertwined, glued together. He isn't bothered, of course. He takes no pleasure in accidentally kicking a few splayed out hands and feet as he passes. None whatsoever.


End file.
